Search This Blog

Posts

In 1843, David Octavius Hill and Robert
Adamson stumbled on a working partnership which began when painter
Hill asked the younger Adamson to take a picture of more than 400
renegade clergymen from the newly formed Free Church of Scotland.
Little did they realise that by documenting such a key moment of
Edinburgh life in such a new-fangled fashion, they were kick-starting
a revolution of their own. Photography had only been invented four
years before, but the pioneering collaboration forged by the pair
paved the way for what would become one of the major artforms of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The result of the partnership can be
seen in A Perfect Chemistry, the first major showing of Hill and
Adamson's work in fifteen years, which is currently on show in the
Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, situated in the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh as part of Edinburgh Art
Festival. The fact that the duo's array of social documentary studies
of Ne…

When an institutionalised
posh boy with mental health issues and a
messiah complex the size of his family's mansion inherits his
father's title, the old school way of doing things appear to be in
ruins. Given that young Jack's ascension comes as a result of an
unfortunate incident during a bout of auto-asphyxiation, his apparent
madness is just one more skeleton in the familial closet. What
follows in John Durnin's rare revival of Peter Barnes' 1968
satire is a piece of madcap classicism which, while clearly a
product of its time, points up how little has changed in a world of
back-scratching toffs.
At first, Jack Wharrier's
mercurial Jack is a voguish hippy, flirting with notions of peace,
love and spiritual enlightenment in a way that sees him mounted on a
cross in a statement of his own self-deified glory. Increasingly
absurdist lurches of style involving references
to Richard III, Victorian pot-boilers and music hall …

My first experience of
live jazz was at the Philharmonic Pub in Liverpool.

The Phil, as it was known,
was and still is situated on the corner of Hope
Street and Hardman Street, diagonally
across the road from the Philharmonic Concert Hall and a
stone's throw from what was then Liverpool College of Art. This
was where John Lennon learnt to rock and roll, while next
door to the Hall, the Everyman Theatre was
making waves in regional theatre. Among the red brick
Georgian terraces of Hope Street in an era where the pubs shut at
half past ten, there also lurked various basement clubs, like the
Casablanca, where actors, poets and bands hung out once they'd come
off stage or done a gig.

This was Liverpool bohemia
writ large. The Phil, or
the Philharmonic Dining Rooms to give it its formal name, was built
between 1898 and 1900, said by some local legends to have been at the
behest of a local millionaire wanting somewhere to house his actress
mistress. It consists of a large bar in a &…

“The sky is opening up!”
says Meow Meow down the line from Australia, where she's just waking
up to the sunniest of mornings. The avant cabaret chanteuse, dancer,
performance artiste and Edinburgh regular has just been talking
about how she feels after coming offstage from her multi media
cabaret version of The Little Mermaid, which plays Edinburgh
International Festival's late night slot at the Hub this year. She's
been talking about feeling part of a higher universe, and the magic
of that, all the while looking out of the window as she talks. Her
sudden exclamation isn't her being melodramatic, however. Rather,
real life has interrupted her reveries in a very fantastical form.

“It's a hot air
balloon,” she says as she watches it float through the clear blue
sky and past her window. While even she couldn't have planned such an
appearance, the drama of it is perfect. “It's as if it's been
summonsed from the wings,” she beams.

Freudian slips are showing
all over the place in this new melding of physical theatre and
virtual reality, played out in the top floor foyer of the Festival
Theatre by Ashford based dance company, AOE. With the room adorned
with a series of geometric sculptures, the audience are kitted out
with a VR headset. This advises the wearer to stand over an
approximation of a wormhole before signalling them to move to one or
another of the sculptures in turn. Once here, the viewer is thrust
into the centre of a 360 degree filmed dream sequence which,
dependent on your reactions, takes you on one of 76 possible journeys
drawn from Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
Over the next fifty
minutes, this dreamer had his internal urges exposed by way of a
series of films involving assorted mini psycho-dramas. Backdrops
included a dinner party, a library and a very Ibsenesque birdcage.
Others will have had a completely different experience.

Peter Principle, who has
died suddenly in Brussels aged 63, was the rhythmic pulse of
Tuxedomoon, the San Francisco sired electronic avant
classical ensemble he joined in 1979, forming the core of the group
with saxophonist Steven Brown and violinist Blaine L Reininger. This
was the case throughout a wilfully singular
anti-career involving various exiles and hiatuses. Alongside fellow
collaborators in video and performance, the trio constructed a back
catalogue of nouveau
primitive punk modernist cabaret that sound-tracked the ruins of an
imagined Europe's past, present and futures. When Tuxedomoon played
their first ever concert in Scotland in 2016 as part of a tour that
saw them recreate their 1980 Half-Mute album in full, the choice of
Edinburgh's multi-arts space Summerhall sat perfectly with the
group's underground experimental aesthetic.

Such sensibilities were
evident too on Principle's four solo albums, which fus…

Life is up and down for
Martin Creed. The most tangible manifestations of the Turner Prize
winner's seemingly structured world-view
can be seen in his public restoration of
the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh in 104 different types of marble.
It's there too just across the road from the Steps in the lift of the
Fruitmarket Gallery, who commissioned the restoration. In
2010, the gallery showed Down Over Up, an
exhibition in which the gallery stairs were
transformed into a synthesiser, with each step playing a different
musical note. The lift did something similar, as a whooshing chorale
moved up and down the scale depending on which way
you were going.

Creed released albums of
spindly minimalist ditties whose words went back and forth as
they reduced an idea to its bare
bones. He did something similar with ballet
when he appeared alongside dancers from Sadlers Wells, who
performed the most basic of steps. The
programme also featured Creed singing songs and screening
films featurin…

Richard Findlay, who has
died after a short illness aged 73, was a rare breed in the
boardrooms of the numerous arts organisations he chaired. Unlike some
of the familiar merry go round of Scottish establishment patricians
looking to up their status by taking on such a role, Findlay cared
deeply about the arts. This was the case whether as the inaugural
chair of the newly set up National Theatre of Scotland in 2003,
or stepping in to steer Creative Scotland out of a mess of the
organisation's own making in 2015. The latter followed a period when
Scotland's arts funding body had become mired in a culture of
managerialism that lost the faith of the artistic community the
organisation was there to serve. Such a
culture was counter to everything that Findlay stood for.

As
an actor, Findlay played small parts in
several TV dramas. It was behind the scenes in broadcast media where
Findlay would excel, however, particularly in
local radio, where…

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.